Assessments of Childhood Apraxia of Speech Disorder

Abstract

Speech communication is important for every human being. Whether the communication is verbal or non-verbal, everyone goes through a specific process to formulate speech. The specific process is known as the speech chain model. As the speaker, the speech communication chain consists of six stages. These are intention, meaning, utterance, articulatory planning, articulatory production, and sound. As the listener, the speech communication chain continues with the auditory response, word sequence, meaning, and then understanding the information that was received. To put this in play, an idea or thought is formed first. The brain then assigns meanings to words and the brain categorizes those words through the mental lexicon. After those words have been assigned, the brain starts planning how to produce thoughts. The brain then sends those plans to the articulatory muscles and produces phonetic sounds to form a meaningful sentence (Denes & Pinson, 1993).